Ruth Pastine
Born1964
New York City, New York, US
EducationHunter College, Cooper Union, Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Known forPainting, multi-panel installations, public art, works on paper
SpouseGary Lang
AwardsElizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Shifting Foundation
WebsiteRuth Pastine

Ruth Pastine (born 1964) is an American artist known for abstract minimalist paintings that explore the phenomenological experience of color, light and space.[1][2] Critics relate her art to the Southern California Light and Space movement,[3][4][5] while identifying key differences, such as its focus on metaphysical aspects of consciousness and its reliance on basic, traditional means (brush, paint, pastels) rather than synthetic-industrial materials.[6][7] In these regards, writers trace her artistic lineage to Monet and Malevich—who sought to capture light's ineffability—and to Abstract Expressionist and Color field painters such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, who probed the chromatic and tonal nuances of oil paint.[8][9][10] Pastine's paintings typically consist of seamless gradating bands or fields of color built in layers with countless brushstrokes, which optically coalesce and appear to pulse, float, dissolve, or glow as if backlit.[11][12][4] Peter Frank has written that she "paints as purely optical a kind of painting as it is possible to paint … nothing but color and its presentation, with myriad, closely shifted color modulations."[13]

Pastine has exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), Lancaster Museum of Art and History (MOAH) and the Carnegie Art Museum.[6][14] Her work belongs to the public collections of SFMOMA,[15] the Museum of Fine Arts Houston,[16] The Phillips Collection,[17] and de Young Museum,[18] among others.[19] She lives and works in Southern California.[20]

Early life and career

Pastine was born in New York City in 1964 and raised in the East Village, Manhattan.[15][21] She developed an early interest in art, and during her attendance at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan determined she would become an artist.[2] After graduating, she studied art at Cooper Union—earning a BFA in 1987—and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.[22] She continued at Hunter College (MFA, 1993), working with Vincent Longo, Robert Morris, Robert Swain and Sanford Wurmfeld.[23][2] Her focus at Hunter centered on painting, critical studies and the color perception work of 19th-century French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul and the artist Josef Albers.[9][22]

In the mid-1990s Pastine began appearing in group shows in New York and the West Coast,[24][25] and gained attention for solo exhibitions at Brian Gross Fine Art (1996, 1998) and Haines Gallery (2000) in San Francisco,[26][27] Deven Golden Fine Art (New York, 1998),[1] and Quint Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, 1999).[3] In 2001, she and her husband, artist Gary Lang, relocated to Southern California, where her work would become associated with the concerns of the Light and Space movement.[23][2][5][28]

In her later career, Pastine has had solo shows at Brian Gross (2008–20),[11][7] Gallery Sonja Roesch (2008–23, Houston),[29][30][31] and Edward Cella Art + Architecture (2009–19)[32][33][34] and Ace Gallery (2016–17) in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles,[5] as well as survey exhibitions at MOAH ("Attraction: 1993-2013," 2014) and the Carnegie Art Museum ("Present Tense," 2015) in California, among others.[6][14]

Work and critical reception

Ruth Pastine, Tribute, Equivalence, "Red Green Series," oil on canvas, 48" x 48" x 2", 2004.

Pastine's art is rooted in the physical, retinal and perceptual phenomena of color and light.[23] She works serially and systematically, methodically constructing oppositions within individual paintings and across bodies of work that challenge preconceptions about color.[33][31] Her purely abstract oil paintings achieve their optical effects by juxtaposing, layering and transitioning complementary, saturated or contrasting-valued hues, engaging phenomena such as color relativity—the perception of influence between adjacent colors.[11][9][2] Peter Frank described her approach as painterly and intuitive, an "on-site evolution" of color presences and relationships involving "optical induction, a stepwise edging of color fields towards and against but never away from one another."[35] Donald Kuspit, among others, has noted a "dialectical" engagement with various dichotomies in Pastine's work: presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, undifferentiated and differentiated, objective reality and subjective perception.[9][6][36]

Early work (1990s–2004)

Pastine's early paintings were small-scale, minimalist, nearly monochromatic works whose rigorous formal systems employed closely valued complementary colors that merged almost imperceptibly within the iconic square format favored by the Russian Suprematists.[24][8][12] She painted them meticulously from the center out with a small brush, producing soft forms that seemed to glow, pulse, float or dissolve in mist-like color fields evoking infinity.[12][37][8][1] Critics suggested that her "Chance Rays" series (1994–8) responded to specific moments of sunlight—for example, the image Ray Painting #3 Milestone, which Robert L. Pincus wrote, "resembled a sunset viewed through a thin veil of fog."[3][1][9] Reviewers connected this work's engagement with both the optical and metaphysical implications of light and color to the formalist, transcendental affinities of artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Malevich, Rothko, Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin, Mary Corse and Agnes Martin.[1][8][3]

With her "Yellow Magenta Series" and "Red Green Series" (1998–2004), Pastine shifted her focus away from the appearance of external influences and natural associations to the experience of light discerned through the perception of color and the optical mixing of pigments on canvases purged of natural associations.[9][27][38][39] New York Times critic Ken Johnson noted the new saturated hues in the former series—"stainy, monochrome pictures [that] vary in color from candy purple to salmon orange to taxicab yellow"—which were mixed wet-into-wet to create an ambiguous sensation of "glowing from within."[40] The "Red Green Series," meanwhile, often used subtler hues that San Francisco critic Kenneth Baker wrote, created "improbable, hypnotic sensations of color as both objective and dematerialized."[27]

Ruth Pastine, Limitless installation, Blue Orange Series pictured, oil on canvas on beveled stretcher, 102" x 144" x 2.5" (each diptych installed); site-specific commission, adjoining north and south lobbies at Ernst & Young Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 2009.

Later exhibitions & commissions

Pastine diversified her color and light investigations in the 2000s to include new formats, geometric forms and color combinations exploring more intense and contradictory luminosities and temperatures.[36][21][14] She began with several series between 2004 and 2009 that employed larger vertical and horizontal (rather than square) canvases, including the "Sameness & Difference," "Convergence," "Black Light" and "Limitless" works.[41][23][21] The change in format shifted her work away from symmetry and toward compositions that were more architectural and less serene in terms of balance, rhythmic oscillation and emotion.[21][2][20]

In the latter three bodies of work, she used subtle, concentric or banded gradations of primary and complementary hues to create a wide range of nuanced color experiences—convergence, reconciliation, temporality and immateriality, suggestions of passion or control—that were furthered by changing light conditions.[42][43][44][29] Donald Kuspit wrote of this work, "at its best, as in Pastine's pure paintings, abstraction remains what it fundamentally is: a risky attempt to evoke numinous feeling, thus sustaining the sense of the sacred in a secular world."[42] The Limitless series included Pastine's first commissioned work—a permanent painting installation at Ernst & Young Plaza in downtown Los Angeles. It consists of two sets of four large vertical paintings (from her "Blue Orange Series" and "Red Green Series", respectively) arranged as four diptychs, which visually linked the building's two immense adjoining lobbies.[2][45] The painting surfaces appear to dematerialize in context with one another, evoking a visceral, inherent tension; that quality is accentuated by custom-designed, deeply beveled stretchers that cause the paintings to appear to float or glow, an effect Pastine would continue to use in her work.[45][11][10]

Ruth Pastine, Inevitability of Truth 6 (Blue Orange) for Malevich, Inevitability of Truth Series, oil on canvas on beveled stretcher, 60" x 60" x 2.5", 2015.

In later series, ("Mind’s Eye: Sense Certainty," 2014; "The Inevitability of Truth," 2015; "Witness," 2017), Pastine mined new color possibilities by shifting from monochromatic, largely primary colors to supersaturated hues that David. M. Roth wrote, suggested "what Mark Rothko might have created had he adopted a Caribbean palette."[7][14][4] These works generally consisted of top-to-bottom bands of color ranging from orange flanked by purple, pink and fuchsia to aquas, blues and pinks, bounded by narrower bands of similar tints that shifted across the spectrum, sometimes subtly and sometimes boldly.[33][7][5] The paintings courted optical banding at the color-shift areas—an effect Pastine discovered while confronting the limitations of working with pastels—that represented compressed versions of her earlier expanded color field transitions.[20] Reviewers sometimes likened these color modulations to musical notes that sounded and were quickly subsumed into orchestral wholes.[7][14] Shana Nys Dambrot wrote, "although the paintings are not actually electric or kinetic, in seeing them one has the distinct sensation of colors breathing, deepening, shifting, and vibrating, changing even as you look right at them, emanating activated auras."[20] These later series also included larger works built around central diamond shapes that were surrounded by concentric bands of intense color (e.g., Matter of Light 2-S4848, 2016).[33][36][30]

In 2020, Pastine's exhibition, "Spectrum Depths" (Gallery Sonja Roesch), featured intimate, eye-popping works painted on paper in response to the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their heightened visual intensity conveyed both a sense of global urgency and a luminosity suggesting hopefulness. (e.g., Yellow 7, 2020).[31]

Recognition

Pastine's work belongs to the public collections of the de Young Museum (Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts),[46] Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation,[19] Lancaster Museum of Art and History,[47] Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Fine Arts Houston,[16] The Phillips Collection,[17] and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,[15] among others.[48] She has received grants from the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (1999) and Shifting Foundation (2000), and a residency from the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation (2018).[49][50]

Pastine has been commissioned to create public art projects for the Ernst & Young Plaza (Limitless, 2009) and CIM Group Headquarters (The Inevitability of Truth, 2015) in Los Angeles, and for the United Airlines Polaris lounge at the Los Angeles International Airport (2019), among others.[45][48][51]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Kuspit, Donald. "Ruth Pastine/Frederick Holland at Deven Golden Fine Art," Artforum, May 1998, p. 150–51. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Carasso, Roberta. "Ruth Pastine," Art Ltd., January 2010, p. 60–61. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Pincus, Robert L. "Color Guard—Ruth Pastine Revels in The Art of The Hue," San Diego Union Tribune, April 1, 1999, p. 48.
  4. 1 2 3 Roth, David. M. "Ruth Pastine @ Brian Gross," SquareCylinder, February 3, 2017. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Pagel, David. "What to see in L.A. galleries: Andrew Masullo’s off-kilter world, plus Gary Lang and Ruth Pastine," Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2016. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Campognone, Andi (ed). "Introduction," Ruth Pastine: Attraction, Lancaster, CA: Lancaster Museum of Art and History, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Roth, David. M. "Ruth Pastine @ Brian Gross," SquareCylinder, September 10, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Morgan, Robert C. "Ruth Pastine at Deven Golden Fine Art," Review, February 15, 1998, p. 25.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Kuspit, Donald. "Selfless Sensations: Ruth Pastine’s Paintings," in Ruth Pastine: Attraction, Andi Campognone (ed.), Lancaster, CA: Lancaster Museum of Art and History, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  10. 1 2 Cameron, Dan. "The Ghost in the Machine," The Technological Sublime, Kensington, MD: Pazo Fine Art, 2022.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Kalisher, Richard. "Ruth Pastine." American Contemporary Art, September 2011, p. 43.
  12. 1 2 3 Morgan, Robert C. "Tense Present—Tense: Ruth Pastine," Cover Magazine, October 1995, p. 48.
  13. ↑ Frank, Peter. "ART 2014 Roundup lll, Ruth Pastine," The Huffington Post, January 9, 2015. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 Carasso, Roberta. " Ruth Pastine: Present Tense," ArtScene, April 2015, p. 11–12. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  15. 1 2 3 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ruth Pastine Artists. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  16. 1 2 Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Ruth Pastine, Blue 12, Collection. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  17. 1 2 The Phillips Collection. Fetish (Red), Primary Red Series, Ruth Pastine, Collection. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  18. ↑ de Young Museum. Pink (Light Red) from the series Double Primary Red Blue, Ruth Pastine, Artworks. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
  19. 1 2 Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. "We Are LA: Contemporary Art from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation," August 1, 2022. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  20. 1 2 3 4 Dambrot, Shana Nys. "Ruth Pastine: BroadBands," Art and Cake, April 18, 2018. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  21. 1 2 3 4 Lindell, Karen. "Chaos and Creation," Ventura County Star, September 9, 2011, C, p. 20-21.
  22. 1 2 Hanson, Sarah P. "Ruth Pastine Paints to Tease the Eye," Introspective, September 21, 2015. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  23. 1 2 3 4 Phelps, Jesse. "Larramendy Hosting Solo Pastine Show," Ojai Valley News, August 27, 2004, p. A-8.
  24. 1 2 Karmel, Pepe. "Review: Vulnerability," The New York Times, September 22, 1995, p. C31. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  25. ↑ Smith, Roberta. "Drawing from Life," The New York Times, February 7, 1997, p. C26. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  26. ↑ Roche, Harry. "Mergings: Ruth Pastine," San Francisco Bay Guardian, September 18, 1996, p. 109.
  27. 1 2 3 Baker, Kenneth. "Paintings Colored by Illusion/Ruth Pastine's work on display at Haines," San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 2000. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  28. ↑ Jenkins, Mark. "Rendering art through light and space," The Washington Post, October 28, 2022. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  29. 1 2 Britt, Douglas. "Ruth Pastine's Paintings Astound," Houston Chronicle, November 10, 2010.
  30. 1 2 Myong, Elizabeth. "Ruth Pastine’s Mirroring Offers a Kaleidoscopic, Enveloping Experience with Color," Houstonia, September 15, 2017. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  31. 1 2 3 Glentzer, Molly. "Ruth Pastine: Spectrum Depths," Houston Chronicle, January 5, 2021. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  32. ↑ Frank, Peter. "Ruth Pastine: Counterpoint," FABRIK, October 2012, p. 78–79. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  33. 1 2 3 4 Pagel, David. "What is truth? One painter’s mesmerizing new show offers an answer," Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2015. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  34. ↑ Dambrot, Shana Nys. "Los Angeles Galleries Steal the Show at Expo Chicago 2018," LA Weekly, October 2, 2018. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  35. ↑ Frank, Peter. "Ruth Pastine: The Optical Sublime," in Ruth Pastine: Attraction, Andi Campognone (ed.), Lancaster, CA: Lancaster Museum of Art and History, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  36. 1 2 3 Will, Rachel. "Discovering the Sublime with Color Field Painter Ruth Pastine," Artsy, September 29, 2015. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  37. ↑ Newhall, Edith. "Ruth Pastine," New York Magazine, February 16, 1998, p. 71.
  38. ↑ Zinsser, John. "Ruth Pastine's Yellow-Magenta Paintings at Margaret Thatcher Projects," Artnet, October 20, 2000. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  39. ↑ Johnson, Ken. "Abstraction And Immanence," The New York Times, October 6, 2000, p. E40. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  40. ↑ Johnson, Ken. "Ruth Pastine," The New York Times, March 23, 2001, p. E35. Retrieved March 134, 2023.
  41. ↑ Lindell, Karen. "Minding the Store," Ventura County Star, September 2, 2004, p. 10-11.
  42. 1 2 Kuspit, Donald. "Ruth Pastine’s Paintings," Ruth Pastine: Limitless, Los Angeles: Edward Cella Art + Architecture, 2009.
  43. ↑ D'Amore, Nicole. "Artist wants people who look at her paintings to think," Ventura County Star, April 27, 2007, p. B4.
  44. ↑ Britt, Douglas. "Ruth Pastine at Sonja Roesch," Houston Chronicle, July 2, 2008.
  45. 1 2 3 Carasso, Roberta. "Ruth Pastine at Ernst & Young Plaza," American Contemporary Art, December 2011, p. 22–24.
  46. ↑ de Young Museum. Gray Blue from the series Double Primary Red Blue, Ruth Pastine, Artworks. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
  47. ↑ Lancaster Museum of Art and History. Ruth Pastine, Inevitability of Truth 29-52424, Collection. Retrieved March 13, 2023.
  48. 1 2 Ocula. Ruth Pastine, Artists. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  49. ↑ The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Ruth Pastine, News. May 16, 2016. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  50. ↑ Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation. Ruth Pastine in Residence – 2018], News. May 30, 2018. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
  51. ↑ Clark, Jonny. "The Chicest Airline Lounges for Traveling in Style," Architectural Digest, October 14, 2021. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
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